The pursuit of justice by authors, artists and reporters often transcends legalistic interpretations and judgements of criminal behaviour. The works of these warriors for truth and justice, bend past and present crimes into a narrative of witnesses and artefacts we can understand and respond to here and now.
ABOVE: Detail from Martin Sharp tapestry OZ? commissioned and donated to the State Library of NSW by Jim and Janette Bain in 1988. The tapestry is now hanging in the Governor Marie Bashir Reading Room on the Lower Ground Floor. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The Pulitzer Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell who was in Australia at the time as visiting writer at Macquarie University and living at Lavender Bay heard the screams on the night of the Luna Park Ghost Train fire Saturday 9 June 1979. He wrote a poem (see below) soon after for the seven dead and their families and the eternity of the screams.
Martin Sharp whose artistic spirit permeated the music revolution of the 1960s with album cover designs and songwriting for the rock supergroup Cream; including his collaboration with Eric Clapton on the song Tales of Brave Ulysses. He created Sydney’s happy face at the entrance of Luna Park. An archway for the innocent joy of children long before the rapacious appetites of fast food and consumerism raised their ugly heads.
ABOVE: Luna Park Sydney’s merry-go-round was made in the USA early in the twentieth century and returned there when Larry Freels, the American property developer and carousel museum proprietor bought it at the auction held over two days in 1981. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
He delighted in creativity with a hypersensitive and unswerving commitment to its purpose. His social connections were neuronal. He very quickly put the together the pieces and players behind the crime of the Luna Park Ghost Train fire and did so with a deeply felt sense of his own accountability. “We (the artists) made it look safe.”
‘I go along to a party. I see Marcia (Premier Neville Wran’s first wife). She says, “What’s happening at Luna Park?” I say, ‘Col Goldstein has got it.’ She says, “Col Goldstein! Abe’s always wanted the Park.” ‘I can’t believe it! Col Goldstein is Abe Saffron’s cousin! And the whole thing went snap – one step further into place.” Sharper 1980 - 2013 A biography of Martin Sharp as told to Lowell Tarling
ABOVE: Luna Park Sydney opened on 4 October 1935 and this photo of one of its vintage murals on tin reflects its ‘Just For Fun’ enduring theme for families down the generations since. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The lasting horror of the Luna Park Ghost Train Fire continues. Martin Sharp passed away in 2013 leaving a lasting legacy of recorded interviews and artefacts sustaining his grasp for the true extent of Abe Saffron’s crime and the murders of John Godson and his two children; Damien and Craig, and four Waverley College students; Jonathan Billings, Richard Carroll, Michael Johnson and Seamus Rahilly.
And now as the 42nd anniversary of the Luna Park Ghost Train fire is upon us one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) gun reporters, a veteran of journalism and exclusive investigative reports way beyond her years, Caro Meldrum-Hanna, assisted in her forensic research by her colleague Patrick Begley, has revealed everything in exquisite and devastating detail in her ABC TV EXPOSED series: The Ghost Fire.
ABOVE: Screen capture of creator, writer and investigative reporter from ABC TV’s three part documentary series EXPOSED: The Ghost Train Fire.
“We’ve interviewed, now, multiple judicial figures, police insiders, detectives, worked our way through a lot of detailed material, and they have come to the conclusion that this was a cover-up and a web of criminal endeavour.” Caro Meldrum-Hanna.
The original coronial inquiry found that there was not the “high degree of negligence necessary to support a charge of criminal negligence”. In 1987 a National Crime Authority investigation into the fire concluded the coronial inquiry was ineffective. The series of three episodes of EXPOSED: The Ghost Fire present a compelling and irresistible case for reopening the investigation into the cause of the fire and a new coronial inquiry.
I first heard of the Luna Park Ghost Train fire and fatalities at 7am on the ABC Radio 702 Sunday 10 June 1979. I was in a car with a friend approaching North Sydney Olympic Pool, next to Luna Park, where we swam routinely almost daily. If I didn’t smell the smoke I thought I could, and still do. I also, like many others, assumed it was an industrial accident caused by negligent management and maintenance. I was too young and self-centred to give a second thought to what I assumed was an accident. Truth be known I was more concerned about what it meant for the future of Luna Park.
When the heart of Luna Park was torn out with the two-day auction on Sunday 31 May and Monday 1 June 1981, of the carousel and other rides and memorabilia dating back to the Park’s opening in 1935. I was there on the Sunday and took a few photos.
ABOVE: Detail of Luna Park Sydney’s vintage merry-go-round on the day it was auctioned 31 May 1981 along with other heritage memorabilia. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
My conclusion, having viewed the EXPOSED: The Ghost Fire series and the intensity and skill of Caro Meldrum-Hanna and her team, the integrity of her interviews and the trauma and pain of the families and friends of the victims, is that the police investigation into the cause of the fire must be reopened in anticipation of a new and comprehensive coronial inquiry. Both made easier and inescapable by the depth and detail of the series. Paraphrasing former ABC investigative reporter Sophie McNeill; ‘We Can’t Say We Don’t Know’.
Seeing children with their families, and teenagers venturing out on their own, often from outer suburbs making the pilgrimage to fun and adulthood on the train, alighting at Milsons Point station and walking down to Luna Park ‘Just For Fun’ the joy of anticipation and accessibility through Martin Sharp’s face is palpable. Public space means everything, and public space where emotions are released and memories are created means even more.
The Luna Park Ghost Train
For the Seven Dead in the Luna Park Fire,
Sydney, June 9, 1979
Today they stand still,
the great fright machines – the doughbeater
which lifted, turned, plunged, yells
of terror in each fist, the fluted pan
which threatened to throw into space
anyone who could shut up, the octoped
which turned victims upside down and jiggled,
rotated, pummelled until enough noise
fell out; and the bright cars do not move,
which wandered overhead, teetered, plunged,
then crawled back and went on wandering;
and the Ghost Train waits, which jerked
screaming hugged and also screaming hugger
by the light of bones through the dark cellars.
Accustomed to all the cries pitched every night
across the water lights, each so like each other
it seemed one permanently terrified girl
must be screaming them all, we who live around Lavender Bay
last night sat up startled, from laughter, or lovemaking,
or the sound of Beethoven exalting both these,
as the screams suddenly pierced our worlds by right of terror.
Today the Ghost Train, charred, and laden with ashes
of seven souls and the bafflement of families,
does not have any special glory to go to.
It must merely wander into the natural world
where all are born, where all suffer, where many scream,
where the lost are not healed but gathered and used again.
– Galway Kinnell